World Population Day 2017 - Family Planning: Empowering People, Developing Nations

Jamaicans are being encouraged to invest more in family planning and achieve healthy and prosperous lives for their families, communities and country as the nation joins the rest of the world in marking World Population Day today.

The theme of this year’s World Population Day is “Family Planning: Empowering People, Developing Nations.”

Globally, this year’s World Population Day coincides with the London Family Planning Summit, which is the second meeting of the consortium of donors and stakeholders that make up the Family Planning 2020 Initiative (FP2020).

This initiative aims to expand access to voluntary family planning to 120 million additional women by 2020.

The 1994 International Conference on Population and Development marked a paradigm shift in the field of population and development, replacing a demographically driven approach with one that is based on couples and individuals’ right to freely and responsibly decide on the number and spacing of their children and to have the information and full range of safe and effective methods to do so.

In recognition of this, the United Nations Population Fund in collaboration with the Planning Institute of Jamaica, the National Family Planning Board-Sexual Health Authority, Women Centre Jamaica Foundation, Women’s Health Network, and other national stakeholders will join Jamaicans and celebrate World Population Day 2017 in St Elizabeth today.

The stakeholders are determined to have a Jamaica where every pregnancy is wanted, every child birth is safe and every young person’s potential is fulfilled.